Old Book Quotes

There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward.
- Peter Ackroyd

Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books
- Aravind Adiga

Just so you know, when they say "once upon a time"....they're lying. It's not once upon a time. Its not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.
- Jodi Picoult

A gold book, fastened together in the shape of a book by wires of the same metal, had been dug up in the northern part of the state of New York, and along with the book an enormous pair of gold spectacles!
- Charles Anthon

Then she let him lick her fingers for her. He ran his tongue around the small ovals of her nails. This was the closest she could get to him without becoming food: she was in him, or part of her was in part of him. Sex was the other way around: While that was going on, he was in her. I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.
- Margaret Atwood

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.
- Bernard Baruch

I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have -- for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.
- L M Montgomery

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.
- Ray Bradbury

I love old books. They tell you stories about their use. You can see where the fingerprints touched the pages as they held the book open. You can see how long they lingered on each page by the finger stains.
- Jack Bowman

I love to both give and receive very old books.
- Augusten Burroughs

THE BODY
of
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Printer
like the cover of an old book,
its contents torn out,
and stripped of its lettering and gilding lies here, food for worms;
Yet the work itself shall not be lost,
For it will (as he believed) appear once more,
in a new,
and more beautiful edition,
corrected and amended
By The AUTHOR
- Benjamin Franklin

I discovered news of old horrors in old books; read intelligence of old atrocities in old periodicals; always in the back of my mind, every day a bit louder, I heard the seashell drone of some growing, coalescing force; I seemed to smell the bitter ozone aroma of lightings-to-come.
- Stephen King

Jake went in, aware that he had, for the first time in three weeks, opened a door without hoping madly to find another world on the other side. A bell jingled overhead. The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming home.
- Stephen King

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal.
- Henry David Thoreau

The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.
- Henry David Thoreau

often she had seemed to herself to be moving among those vanished figures of old books and pictures, an invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them than with her own friends. she very nearly lost consciousness that she was a separate being, with a future of her own.
- Virginia Woolf

You mean old books?"
"Stories written before space travel but about space travel."
"How could there have been stories about space travel before --"
"The writers," Pris said, "made it up.
- Philip K Dick

There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos.
- Scott Douglas

...Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.
- Arthur Conan Doyle

And yet sometimes she worried about those musty old books were doing to her. Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists.
- Jeffrey Eugenides

Ereaders were a great convenience, but nothing could beat the smell of a library and old books.
- Kate Evangelista

In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.
- Anne Fadiman

There are three things that grow more precious with age; old wood to burn, old books to read, and old friends to enjoy.
- Henry Ford

Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only - finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'.
- Thomas Hardy

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.
- William Temple

I love everything that's old, - old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.
- Oliver Goldsmith

When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.
- Erica Jong

The great inconvenience of new books is that they prevent us from reading old books.
- Joseph Joubert

My favorite smells are freshly baked bread, the pages of an old book, and they way my boss' ass smells when he's shouting at me.
- Jarod Kintz

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.
- C S Lewis

What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.
- James Russell Lowell

Isn't it what all librarians strive toward, at least in the movies and cliches? Silence, invisibility, nothing but a rambling cloud of old book dust.
- Rebecca Makkai

Alexandria and its scholars [...] never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an ever-shifting present in which new readers engaged with old books which became new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
- Alberto Manguel

Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.
- Alberto Manguel

It's not an old book, or a treasure map. Nope. Staring up at me was a pile of rocks.
- Wendy Mass

I don't think I've ever read an old book through from start to finish. Not after more than six months after writing it, that is.
- Nicholas Mosley

Read two old books for every new one.
- J I Packer

opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.
- Diane Setterfield